How We Operate Our American Software Business In China
It has been a year since we started the MMF business in America, as a Chinese software startup. To be short, MMF is a cloud-based appointment software which enables small business like salon, and massage spa to schedule service appointments more efficiently. Thanks for the internet, everybody now can expand their business to any corner in the world as long as they have something to sell, and don’t have to physically go there, register a new company and open a local office as traditional. I am not saying that opening a local company is not necessary anymore for transnational corporations, localization is must-have for any successful and growing company like Amazon, eBay, and Macdonald. But it cost too much for a newborn startup like us which don’t have millions of dollars to burn for surviving, and it is a good strategy that starts the business from outside first before opening a local office/company, this is why we start our American software business in China. We are now having about 10 sign up daily for our appointment software and I am going to share respectively how we do it with you on different factors.
Hire And Do The Same as Silicon Valley, But In China
We moved into a new, bigger office last week to adapt for our growing technical team in China, and we are still hiring more. Currently, we have a total of 19 colleagues, include 3 designers, 10 front-end and back-end developers, 2 test engineers, 2 product managers, and 2 marketers. There is a big advantage hiring engineers in China compared to other countries like US and Europe nations, which is the similar skill set, productivity for programmers while the paycheck is lower. There is no doubt China has many of the best programmers in different areas and the average salary for the top experts with more than 7 years experience is about $5800 per month, which you can only hire a junior engineer with 1–2 years experience in Silicon Valley with this amount of money, so that we are able to hire better engineers with limited amount of budget in China. Similar to many tech companies in Silicon Valley, we start working at 10 am of the day and off from work at 6–7 pm, which contains a 2-hour break at noon. Like many other IT companies, we also work overtime to the midnight when shits happen like fixing bugs, a deadline is coming for new features. Etc.
The Fact of Our Marketing
We have to admit that the internet makes global marketing easier than ever, the only reason we can start our American software business in China is that we can easily promote our software to the potential customers in America through social media, Google/Facebook paid ads, emails, and online publications. We reach out to our customers on Instagram, our Facebook page, Google Adwords, and cold emails, as well. As the data shows we gain an average of 10 sign up daily from Google Adwords with about $10 per conversion, we have a basic software plan for $15/month, which means we are having at least $5 potential profit per month for each customer, this is a good sign. There is something I want to talk about more is that based on our countless testing, it turns out that Google Display campaign seems like are having a much better performance than Google search campaign in terms of lower cost per conversion, higher clicks & conversion daily. On the other hand, we send software invitations to our potential customers by emails, and it is not hard for us to get a 50%+ open rate and 5%-9% click-through.
The strategy here for higher email click-through rate is try to make it more personal and mysterious, like ‘send an invitation’ as we did, and make the email content to be short, personal, and play a game of curiosity with target audience, when everything is all set, don’t forget adding a nice and clear call to action button at the bottom of the email.
E-mail First for Customer Service
As a China-based startup with a small marketing team, we currently only able to get in touch with our American customers and provide them with any supports by emails. We have help center on our website with our full contact information, any customers emails will be responded in 24 hours and we also send out emails for collecting feedbacks and questions twice a month, and in many cases we have to deal with customer complaints about the software by emails and it works well every time when we help them to solve problems step by step in emails, sometimes with images too. It might not be as efficient as a phone call, but it is useful that we can carefully edit & review our email contents before sending out so that we can fully show our respects to the customers while answering their questions and providing them the best support of all kind. We get enough time to think what we should write in emails, and we can’t do the same when having a phone call, words come out straight from our mouth and it will be a disaster when we are not well-trained and ready.
We are doing good on the current stage, and our software sign up number is increasing steadily, our technical team in China is working hard to make sure all the features, APIs, mini-programs are running in a good condition. But as I mentioned above, the localization is still a must-have strategy for foreign companies which try to grow faster, and we are just too far away from that phase yet. We are going to continue our current operating strategies until we hit our goal this time, which is having $100,000 in revenue per month, and we will move to the next chapter. The purpose of this article is to hopefully provide you guys with some general insights into how things are working together when we try to join a different market without physically get there and start a brand new business. If you like it please don’t hesitate to give us a clap.
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